Victoria’s silences are their own form of communication. Some are defensive—walls thrown up when emotion threatens to breach the surface. Some are dissociative—the void taking her somewhere I can’t follow. And some, like this one, are deliberate. Strategic. The silence of a woman deciding exactly how much truth to allocate to her response.
“Outside.”
One word. Delivered with the tonal flatness of someone ordering coffee.
This woman.
This infuriating, beautiful, self-destructive woman.
I smirk, because what else can you do when the person you’ve dedicated yourself to keeping alive treats their own existence like an optional feature they haven’t decided whether to renew? Anger doesn’t work—she’ll match it and exceed it. Concern makes her retreat further into the void. Lectures bounce off her like rain off that leather bodysuit she has no business looking that good in.
So I smirk, and I pivot.
“Come here.”
She drags her feet.
Literally, physically drags them across the hardwood floor—the bare skin of her feet producing a soft shushing sound against the wood as she shuffles toward me with the enthusiasm of someone approaching a dentist’s chair. Her body language is petulant in a way that she’d never permit in public, whereevery movement is controlled and deliberate and calculated for maximum survival efficiency. Here, in the privacy of this condemned little sanctuary, she allows herself the luxury of being annoyed.
It’s one of my favorite versions of her.
Not that I’d ever tell her that.
She reaches me and stops, close enough that the warmth radiating from the stove behind me meets the persistent coolness of her skin—that chronic inability to thermoregulate that makes her run cold in every room, every season, every circumstance. I can see the faint goosebumps on her bare arms, the fine hair rising in response to a temperature her body perpetually finds insufficient.
She’ll never ask for a jacket.
She’d rather freeze.
Which is why I always leave one within reach.
Her hair is in her face.
Those dark blue strands with their threads of pale blue and soft blonde have fallen across her forehead and curtained one eye, and she hasn’t bothered to push them back because Victoria, when she’s like this—freshly woken, still medicated, existing in the liminal space between the void and the present—doesn’t process herself the way she processes the world. The world gets her sharp, analytical attention. Her own needs barely register.
I reach out and fix it.
My fingers are gentle—gentler than my hands were built for, gentler than anything about me has a right to be. I tuck the strands behind her ear, letting my fingertips graze the cool shell of cartilage and the softer skin beneath it. The contact is brief, but I feel the way her body responds—a micro-relaxation, a loosening of some invisible thread that keeps her wound tight enough to snap.
“You’re literally half asleep, aren’t you?”
She sighs.
Long. Slow. The kind of exhale that carries the weight of every morning she’s woken up alive and found the experience disappointing.
“I’m supposed to be recovering,” she mutters, her voice still carrying the husky remnants of sleep and medication. “Not going to dance recitals as if they give a damn about my existence.”
I nod, accepting the truth of it because lying to Victoria is both pointless and insulting.
“True and valid.” I let the agreement hang for a beat before adding, “But you enjoy watching those young Omegas infatuate about you.”
The first-year dancers at the Academy’s recreational studio—the only venue in Savage Knot that permits artistic expression, and only because someone powerful enough to protect it decided it served a purpose. Victoria teaches there. Unofficially, of course. Nothing about her existence in Savage Knot is official. But the young Omegas who attend the classes watch her the way astronomy students watch comets—with breathless, reverent awe at something beautiful that might not come back.
They see what the others don’t.
The grace beneath the emptiness.
The art beneath the survival.
